The world's cuisine culture is changing, diversified food ingredients are available, and a variety of ways for cooking food has been developed. To provide diversified liquid drinks in a convenient manner, many specific systems and methods for this purpose have also been developed.
Particularly, coffee has become one of the most popular beverages in the modern society. Currently, specialty coffee stores are common in the market to sell coffee-related products. When a consumer orders a cup of coffee in a specialty coffee store, the operator first takes out from a coffee bean container a quantity of coffee beans substantially sufficient for making a cup of coffee and then grinds the coffee beans and brews coffee. The brewed coffee is then served to the consumer. The quantity of coffee beans taken out from the container each time often varies with different operators who are different in the experience of brewing coffee. In the event too many coffee beans are taken out from the container at a time, it is possible the brewed coffee would taste too strong to be welcomed by the consumer. Further, in the event too many coffee beans are ground at a time, it is possible not all the ground coffee beans are used to make a cup of coffee. The extra ground coffee beans are usually discarded to form unnecessary waste and increase the material cost of the coffee store. On the other hand, in the event an insufficient quantity of coffee beans is taken out from the container for making a cup of coffee, the brewed coffee might taste too light and the operator might have to discard it and make another cup of coffee. This would also increase the material cost of the coffee store.
There are specialty coffee stores that sell their home-brand roasted coffee beans. The store usually manually weighs and dispenses the roasted coffee beans according to the quantity the consumer ordered. The manual dispensing of coffee beans requires high labor cost and can not be fast and accurately done to meet the same quantity of coffee beans ordered by the consumer.
To overcome the above problems, a coffee bean dispenser has been developed and introduced into the market. However, the currently available coffee bean dispenser uses a conveyor belt to convey the coffee beans, making the coffee bean dispenser bulky in volume and not suitable for using on a bar counter. Besides, the coffee bean dispenser with the conveyor belt still fails to accurately control the quantity or weight of the coffee beans to be dispensed each time.